Want to expand time? Want to create lasting memories that leave notches in your brain creating an ever-expanding temporal yardstick? Well, you won’t like the following advice, but this is one of the most effective tools to impact “chronoception” or perceptual time.

Design Fear and Suffering Into Your Vacations. “What?!” you say, “why would I intentionally ruin my blissful escape from the day-to-day grind? “I’ve worked hard and suffered to earn this respite – why would I ruin it??”

Here’s why: vacations give you a freedom to escape the routine, to generate experiences that are new, different, and intense. The kind of experiences you can recall with in uncanny detail months, years, even decades later. But here’s the rub: almost always the best and most expansive memories we have involve incidents of suffering that, in the moment, were a crisis or a struggle, but with the patina of time and under the golden gloss of memory have subsequently become the highlights of the stories you tell. The human brain is wired to identify with the hero’s journey or monomyth and each hero’s journey contains elements of stress and crisis as the center of the plot. Odds are good, your best vacation stories include some sort of challenge or crisis.

Breaking it down:

We, as humans, are wired for stories – facts and data are easily forgotten, but stories we remember.

All stories, particularly the most memorable, have a plot.

All plots have a crisis: a struggle often involving fear and suffering.

If you don’t have a crisis you don’t have a plot.

If you don’t have a plot you don’t have a story.

If you don’t have a story you won’t have anything to remember.

∴ (Therefore) you must design fear and suffering into your vacations. It is simple logic.

Conclusion: Sure you can go to the all-inclusive resort, lounge calmly by the pool sipping cocktails. But, when you return home a week later, and you are asked “how was your vacation?” there most likely will be moment of awkward silence, a pause as you search your memory for the thread of a narrative, and then, absent a plot, a crisis or a story, your answer will be a slightly chagrined “great!” End of conversation.